Live! From Planet Earth

There's a lot to unpack in Live! From Planet Earth, (a posthumous anthology of George Alec Effinger stories) but the most interesting ones are the O. Niemand stories (slightly less so their forerunner, "Two Sadnesses.")

The O. Niemand stories are a kind of shared universe story -- they're pastiches of famous American short story writers, set on an asteroid with a dome for life support. The stories have little to no commonality other than that -- they share the same world, but the characters from different stories never touch, or are even glimpsed in the periphery of the others' circles. The Ring Lardner takeoff "Two Bits" and the Twain sendup "The Wisdom of Having Money" are the best of these; the Hemingway bite ("Afternoon Under Glass") is quietly powerful.

Since this is an anthology selected by other writers and editors, we get a blurb at the beginning of each story. Some are more about the writer's connection with Effinger, others are more about the story they're nominally introducing. It's a nice touch, to humanize a man that we wouldn't otherwise know.

There are a few stories in here that aren't strictly science fiction -- "Housebound" is a treatment of agoraphobia, and "Glimmer, Glimmer" works as horror, but it's the same voice throughout. One of Effinger's touches is that even those we would think are the most competent are just as human and scared and fallible as the rest of us -- witness the President in "Solo in the Spotlight."

Not that this is perfect -- "Target: Berlin!" and "At the Bran Foundry" are both farces that don't entirely work for me. "All the Last Wars at Once" is a bit of one, but it absolutely does. "Everything But Honor" is a time travel story with a nice twist, with an ending that's . . .well, not perfect, but in the hands of someone else, it could have been very ugly. 
 
Effinger was a talent who died far too young, and this is absolutely worth picking up.

The Man in the High Castle

As with all of Philip K. Dick's work, the question has to do with the nature of reality, and our relation to reality. The reality here is an alternate history in which Giuseppe Zangara succeeded in assassinating FDR, leading to the Axis triumphing over the Allies in the Second World War.

How realistic is the alternate reality? I'm not sure I buy the Nazis on Mars (!) in 1962. The scope of their projects? Absolutely. Our setting is the Western United States, though, an area controlled by the conquering Japanese.

One device that I really like is the incorporation of the I Ching, which several of the characters use to guide their actions; "should I follow the suggested course?" or "what is going to happen next?"

A nod at the nature of reality is that there's a popular novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (paraphrased from a line in Ecclesiastes) in which Roosevelt survives the assassination (as he does in our reality) and through his strong leadership, the US is prepared for World War II, and the Allies win. As more of this novel-within-a-novel is revealed, it's clear that the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is not our own -- Roosevelt doesn't seek a third term, and there are other important points of divergence.

The climax of the novel is (perhaps) a Japanese diplomat slipping into another reality after contemplating a piece of jewelry made by American artisans. Left unsaid is if the reality is the one of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, of our reality, or another one entirely. (One would think the reality would be one of the above. A third reality, resembling both of those, would be needlessly complicated, right?)

Or perhaps the climax could be said to be the end, which implies (of course, this being Dick) that the world of the novel isn't the true reality, but a false one. As to whether true reality is the world of The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (thus implying our world is false, as well), our world, or another one entirely is left unsaid.

I really enjoyed this -- I thought the characters moved the plot well and were better put together than some of Dick's other stories, and the interweaving of Japanese culture into American really worked for me. The questions as to the nature of reality and the prophecy of the Book of Changes were well incorporated, as well. Recommended.